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Adjusting the feedback allows the delay to remain longer and gives you more repeats to play to but be aware that your mistakes will also last longer! Stewart Copeland famously used a delay set to around 320ms on his hihats in particular to help build his complex illusion of incredible hi-hat skills. Flange: Roland’s description is smack on: “Produces a metallic resonance that rises and falls somewhat like a jet airplane taking off or landing”. Yep, that’s the sound… Feedback : Amount of the flanger sound that is fed back into the effect (minus values invert the phase). Chorus: Helps make sounds rich and spacious. Phaser: Produces a swirling modulation effect to sounds. As used on the drums on Led Zep’s ‘Kashmir’. A typical phaser could have the following settings: ○ Freq: Which frequency of the sound is to be ‘Phased’ in cycles per second or Hertz (Hz). ○ LFO Rate: Speed of ‘oscillation’ of the signal in Hz. ○ Depth: How deeply the phase will affect the signal. ○ Resonance: How wide or narrow the ‘bandwidth’ of the phasing will be. High values will sound sharper and more nasal. Distortion: An intense and often more dramatic and fuzzier overdrive. Gain: Amount of distortion. Enhancer: Controls the overtone structure of the high frequencies, adding sparkle and brightness to the sound. Sens: Sensitivity and responsiveness of the enhancer. LF Level: The volume level of the low frequency range of the direct sound. Ring Mod (modulation): Nothing to do with any Peter Jackson film or some kind of new fashion clique, ring modulation is a curious effect where amplitude modulation is applied to the sounds by multiplying their signals and outputting the sum and difference of their harmonic content, effectively ‘frequency mixing’. Great for creating unusual metallic bell-like effects on toms in particular! Check out Wiki for some examples of ring modulation at work. Okay, so those are some of the tools available to you. Get stuck in and see what you can come up with and most importantly remember the first rule: There are no rules… 48
Behind the sounds SOME CLASSIC DRUM sounds have been captured in the most unusual ways and places. Ringo’s famous fat tom sound in the Beatles’ ‘Come Together’ was created by placing tea-towels over the toms and recording them as an overdub or double-track recording over the initial drum kit recording. Once Ringo and the Abbey Road engineers started using this technique, they could hardly stop. You’ll hear these distinctive, compressed and warm tom and snare sounds all over Ringo’s recordings through the 60s, which help add great depth and dimension to the recordings. Listen to Led Zeppelin’s cover version of ‘When The Levee Breaks’ to hear John Bonham’s kit processed with a ‘slap back’ style of echo. The track was recorded by engineer Andy Johns in the main hallway of Headley Grange, an old building with a central stairwell. Microphones were placed on the drums at the bottom and two mics were placed in stereo on the second floor to capture a delayed and slightly muffled version of the kit performance. This can also be done with an analogue tape machine. ‘Slap back’ tape echo can be created easily when using a reel-to-reel tape machine by utilising the inherent physical gap between the record and playback heads of the machine to create this delay. When you listen to both signals at once, you get a single delay pulse happening with a slight difference or degradation in sound due to the inaccuracy of reproducing sound from tape. The delay time depends on how fast you run the tape. Producers like Phil Spector used this to great effect on many John Lennon records. Have a listen to ‘Imagine’, ‘Mind Games’ and ‘Instant Karma’ for some great examples of its use on vocals. Phil Collins’ enormous drum sound on Face Value’s ‘In The Air Tonight’ was created by recording the sound of the drum room through the studio talkback microphone. The SSL consoles as used in the session have heavy compressors built into the talkback mic section so that musicians at the back of a recording room could still be heard even if they were talking quietly (remember that compressors effectively boost quiet sounds and pull down loud ones). Engineer Hugh Padgham had the SSL engineers simply wire the output of the talkback section to the patch bay so it could be recorded. A noise gate was then placed over the talkback mic channel and some direct signal from the close drum kit mics was sent to the side chain or key-in of the gate to force it to open whenever a close-miced tom or snare was hit. www.digitaldrummermag.com